OpenSocial is making progress; the world spins faster

Jason Kincaid wrote a nice piece on TechCrunch about the progress of OpenSocial (a standard interface for plugging your social application into a social network), with a rather attractive and impressive chart:

So what does this have to do with decision making? Not much, but it is such a pretty chart, so I thought I'd post it.

Actually, it is a bit relevant. We've talked about how the workplace is being transformed, and this is part of the reason... the increasing social aspects of applications. While OpenSocial is usually talked about in context of the popular consumer Social Networks (which gives them the ridiculous and oft-misleading numbers above), a growing number of enterprise applications are starting to utilize it, for a simple reason: it is not that hard, and it gives you wide reach.

So as applications become more social people, theoretically, become more connected.  And what then?  Will that help us make faster decisions?  In certain cases it should, removing the friction that currently exists between applications and people.  In other cases we will just spend more time fending off the annoying people.

But people are key to decision velocity.  And applications are largely devoid of people relationships.  So OpenSocial is interesting, and in general, an important step forward.